Klopp’s science and rigour paves way for Liverpool to win a game of inches

Imagine, for a moment, you’re the goalframe at the east end of Wembley. Last summer, you watched as Marcus Rashford, at the climax of that sulphurous July night, took a straight run-up, stuttered, and then, as Gianluigi Donnarumma fell to your left, dragged his penalty to your right.

You like the young man, his obvious decency, his stance on various social issues – and you are an English goalframe after all. You wanted him to score. You tried to just stretch a bit further, to widen your stance, but your feet were rooted and the ball cannoned off the base of your post and away. If only he had struck it three inches more centrally you probably could have helped it in, and if you had, England would probably be European champions and Rashford might not have had such a miserable season; Manchester United might not feel like quite such a faded force in need of desperate reconstitution.

On Saturday, César Azpilicueta’s penalty clipped the outside of your left-hand post and went wide, and immediately Thiago Alcântara’s effort nudged the inside of your right-hand post and went in. If either had been three inches the other way, the outcome would have been different and Édouard Mendy’s save from Sadio Mané – the great psychodrama between international teammates, which Jürgen Klopp acknowledged he had needlessly complicated by telling Mané not to go with his usual approach – would have won the final for Chelsea.

And had that happened, how different the aftermath would have felt, how different the emotions on Sunday morning. What a sense that goalframe must have of the arbitrariness of human destiny, how life can teeter on a knife edge before taking a decisive plunge in one direction or the other.

If Chelsea had won, we would now be